Innholdsfortegnelse for August 19, 2019 i The New Yorker

Sixteen years ago, in 2003, the student newspaper at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, a historically black institution in Tallahassee, published a lively column about white people. “I don’t hate whites,” the author, a senior named Ibram Rogers, wrote. “How can you hate a group of people for being who they are?” He explained that “Europeans” had been “socialized to be aggressive people,” and “raised to be racist.” His theory was that white people were fending off racial extinction, using “psychological brainwashing” and “the AIDS virus.” Perhaps the most incendiary line appeared at the end, after the author’s byline and e-mail address: “Ibram Rogers’ column will appear every Wednesday.” As it turned out, that final claim, like a few of the claims that preceded it, was not quite accurate. The…

Two summers ago, I went to a beach in Northern California that’s famous for sea glass. I lay in the sun until the tide touched my shoes, then crawled around on my knees, combing for the luminous green pieces. I didn’t look up until I bumped into an older woman who was filling a leather pouch with shards. “I like the green ones, too,” she said. “They’re real neon.” She told me they were from nineteenth-century Vaseline bottles that glowed if you put them under black light. She explained where all the colors came from. Amber from aromatherapy bottles. White from milk bottles. Red was very rare, and so were black and turquoise. Her favorite color—the hardest to find—was amethyst. She told me that her name was Venus, and I…

Today I thought I’d just take a lie-down, and drift. So here I am listeningTo the tick of my mechanical aortic valve—overhearing, rather, the way it flitsIn and out of consciousness. It’s a wonder what goes on below the threshold.It’s quiet up here, just the muted swoosh of the cars on the Antrim Road,And every so often the shrill of a far-off alarm or the squeal of brakes;But yesterday some vandal upended the terra-cotta pot of daffodilsIn our little front garden, that’s not even as big, when I consider it,As the double bed I’m lying on. Behind the privet hedge, besides the daffodilsThere’s pansies, thyme, and rosemary. A Hebe bush. A laurel. RuefullyI scuffed the spilled earth and pebbles with my shoe and thought of Poussin—Was it Poussin?—and his habit…

The MVP Machine, by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik (Basic). The “Moneyball” revolution in evaluating baseball players had little to offer on improving performance. But the authors of this engrossing book follow the pitcher Trevor Bauer as he uses high-speed cameras and radar tracking to hone his physical gifts. In order to make the ball move more in the air, Bauer analyzes its path the instant it leaves his fingers, and studies a principle in fluid dynamics called the laminar effect. The pitch he develops, the Laminar Express, makes him a star, and the league’s best teams have copied his techniques. The Red Sox now travel with “force plates,” to study the kinetic chain of a player’s swing. A History of the Bible, by John Barton (Viking). In addition to laying out…

Some plays, proceeding carefully but not all that deftly, exist only to dump a helping of devastation onto the audience’s lap. These tearful noodges remind me of the errant Rube Goldberg machine that cracked me up as a kid when it appeared on the “Tom and Jerry” cartoon on Saturday mornings. Tom the cat, moonlighting as an engineer and promising a “better mouse trap,” rigs up some hyper-complicated doozy, held together by the thinnest string, just outside Jerry’s hole, hoping finally to see the mouse go kersplat. One tug of the cheese sets an alarm clock ringing, then a saw gnawing inanely at a log, churning on and on, a cascade of linked but frivolous effects, until a huge and heretofore unseen safe drops from the sky and lands not…

LAND AND LOSS Lizzie Presser’s piece about the Reels brothers’ fight to reclaim their family’s land brought to mind a similar case I worked on as an attorney (“The Dispossessed,” July 22nd). In 1981, I was hired to represent an African-American family living in rural Kentucky. Their property was adjacent to Lake Cumberland, a location whose value had increased considerably. The case was a hopeless mess, owing to both the local court’s hostility toward the defendants and the abject failure of the county sheriff to deliver justice. I can still remember the contempt the county clerk displayed when I filed the legal paperwork. The family had travelled a hundred and twenty miles to find an attorney who would represent them, which speaks volumes about the discrimination that they experienced. I…

I like when the choices are both ugly—the rock and the hard place. Odysseus choseScylla and I, too, would have opted fora terrestrial evil, the sea vortex probablyconcealing some subterranean meat with its beauty.Soon you and I will exist in different time zones.While day breaks for you, night will hold me to the big, wild moon.I cast a wakeful light unravelling across the ocean.While you swim in open Spanish waters brushingthe bright-eyed fish, I spin in a street of yellow carsnod off to an organ in a small church on Broadway.When you face the queen medusas in the watertransfixed by their pale rosy pulsestheir accusatory look of afterlife—know that you are facing me.I am them in hundreds, blind and mutantready to greet and interrogate your days.These hallucinations are such a…

A mong the many issues currently polarizing American politics—abortion, climate change, health care, immigration, gun control—one of the most consequential tends to be one of the least discussed. The American electorate, across the country, is diversifying ethnically and racially at a rapid rate. Progressives, interpreting the shift to mean that, following traditional paths, the new voters will lean Democratic, see a political landscape that is turning blue. Conservatives apparently see the same thing, because in recent years many of them have supported policies, such as voter-I.D. laws and voter-roll purges, that have disproportionately affected people of color. The issue has become more pressing with the approach of the 2020 Presidential election. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that federal judges do not have the power to address partisan gerrymandering, even…

Today is to be Parts of the Parts of my Sure, Jer Please do Point at parts of me while saying the name of it off our list of Words Worth Knowing. Agespot Finger Wrist At wrist Jer says, This one’s been broken, seems like. Then pokes. Ouch? he says. Yes, I say. Groin Waist You were no spring chicken, says Jerry. I do not understand what you just said, please explain, I say. You were not young, Jerry says. Your body is not the body of a young person. Oh, that’s cool, I say. That’s cool, Jer. Jer shakes his head his certain way Meaning: 89, you crack my ass up. Long ago, perhaps one week, we had Explain Time, due to figure of speech crack my ass up…

At some point in the past decade, the bedroom replaced the garage as the primary spiritual escape hatch for suburban teen-agers who wanted to express themselves through music. Oversized amps and hand-me-down drum sets were usurped by Wi-Fi, laptops, and home-recording software. The angst and the noise of garage rock gave way to more subdued sounds, as young musicians began making the kind of hushed, Internet-facing electronic pop that could be kept secret from adults, rather than weaponized against them. This insular form of music eventually crystallized into a scene called “bedroom pop”—a digitally connected cohort of musicians with its own stars, styles, and dedicated playlists. (It also shifted the meaning of the word “bedroom” in music away from the sensual and toward the cerebral.) Like many terms used…

“For over forty years, ‘Sherman’s Showcase’ has been a revolutionary black music slash dance slash entertainment program unlike anything else on TV. Except… for several other shows,” John Legend announces, gliding across a stage like a polite cheetah. A list of variety shows scrolls swiftly up the screen: “Solid Gold, Soul Train, Burt Sugarman’s Midnight Special, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, MTV’s The Grind with Eric Nies, Caribbean Rhythms (with Rachel!),” and then, more randomly, “The Crown (Season 1)” and “Power (do you watch it? It’s great).” “Sherman’s Showcase,” created by Bashir Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle, two former Jimmy Fallon writers best known for “Slow Jam the News,” is a joyful Sunbeam Mixmaster of a sketch show, a Spirograph set spinning through decades of black pop culture, finding faintly psychedelic patterns,…

The American artist Mark Dion has developed a unique strain of ecological art, playing the role of amateur naturalist with sculptural installations that riff on architectural “follies,” popularized in eighteenth-century Britain, whose sole purpose is to tease the imagination. The reed-clad “Hunting Blind (The Dandy Rococo)” overlooks a pond at Storm King, in Cornwall, New York, where a selection of Dion’s follies grace the five-hundred-acre outdoor museum through Nov. 11. NIGHT LIFE Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. Backstreet Boys Barclays Center The Backstreet Boys might seem like a relic of nineties-and-early-two-thousands pop culture, but the band’s five members continue to fill stadiums with screaming fans, even as they approach middle age. It’s tempting to chalk up their longevity to…

“That sounds like film music” is a put-down that deserves to be retired. The usual intention is to dismiss a work as splashy kitsch. Over the past century, though, enough first-rate music has been written for the movies that the charge rings false. Hollywood composers have employed so many different styles that the term “film music” has little descriptive value. Worst is when the pejorative is used to discount figures who brought distinctive personalities to the scoring business, thereby elevating it. Such was the fate of the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who began his career, in Vienna, as one of the most astonishing child prodigies in musical history and who reached maximum fame writing film scores, in Los Angeles, in the nineteen-thirties and forties. A master of late-Romantic opulence, Korngold…